Continuities and Changes in Party Positions Towards Europe in Italian Parties: An Examination of Parties’ Manifestos.
Sylvia Kritzinger*, Francesco Cavatorta° and Raj S. Chari◊
Department of Political Science*
Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna (IHS), Austria
Department of Politics°
University College Dublin, Ireland
Department of Political Science◊
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Date: 01/11/03
Introduction
Over the last decade, scholars of European politics have increasingly analysed the concept of ‘Europeanisation’. Their focus has been on the Europeanisation processes of EU public policies (Cowles, Caporaso and Risse, 2001; Börzel, 1999; Tallberg, 2002; Radaelli, 1997) and of party structures within the European political space such as party groups in the European Parliament (EP) and their policy positions (Gabel and Hix, 2002; Hix and Lord, 1997; Raunio, 1996). Despite the strengths of these works, absent in the literature is a cogent analysis considering the ‘Europeanisation of national political parties’. National policy-making actors and institutions such as political parties are left unconsidered and unexplored (Ladrech, 2002), and have not fully been analysed as active actors in European integration, neglecting the possibility that the EU is also structuring parties’ national political space. Furthermore, they also fail to examine how national parties are affected by, and adapt to, supranational level developments.
Seeking to transcend these insufficiencies in the literature, this study aims to provide a deeper understanding of national political parties in the integration process and to offer a substantial contribution to the Europeanisation debate by fully incorporating analysis of the role of political parties. The aim is to combine the two major strands in the recent literature and, thus, to examine the Europeanisation processes in an institutional environment situated at the national level. The broad understanding of Europeanisation to be developed, which we argue extends upon the top-down approach in the existing Europeanisation literature, is that political parties are increasingly extending the boundaries of the relevant political space beyond the national level (Kohler-Koch, 1999) while, simultaneously, incorporating the European dimension in their domestic discourse and structures (Radaelli, 2000) allocating more importance to it. In other words, our definition of Europeanisation entails both a positional dimension, which reflects the parties’ position towards Europe, and a salience dimension, which reflects the importance that parties’ attribute towards integration. By our definition, then, if Europeanisation of political parties is fully occurring, one would expect that Europe leads both to a change in parties’ EU-positions and to an increase of parties’ EU-salience.
The data analysed consists of Italian parties’ manifestos for national and European elections. We analyse the manifestos from 1979 to 1999 with the ‘Wordscore’-programme (Laver, Benoit and Garry, 2003) in order to gauge whether or not Europeanisation of salience and the national political space has occurred.
This article has three sections. The first reviews in more depth the theoretical debates on Europeanisation of political parties and shows where our study is embedded. This section also details the objectives of this study and illustrates the peculiarities of Italian political parties and their commonly assumed positions towards Europe. The second section introduces the method of analysis and deals with the research design. The third discusses the study’s results, highlighting its contribution towards the Europeanisation debate.
Political Parties and European Integration
A theoretical overview
Our study is situated in the two main theoretical debates that analyse party developments in context of the EU. The first downplays the importance of dynamics between integration and parties, while the other points to, although it does not fully develop or compellingly demonstrate, its significance.
The first, clearly pre-dominant, view undermines the importance of Europeanisation and national parties, arguing that parties are not influenced by EU-level developments. This literature has been concerned exclusively on EP election dynamics, approximating only descriptive analysis that is not comparative in its examination. For example, examining electoral campaigns for EP elections over twenty-five years, some argue that national issues are dominant: in order to obtain citizens’ votes and modify favourably the domestic political situation, parties give privilege to national themes over topics of general European interest, resulting in EP elections being labelled as ‘second-order elections’ (Hix and Lord, 1997; Van der Eijk and Franklin, 1996; Marsh, 1998; Reif, 1997). Although citizens decide on the composition of the EP and therefore European legislation, national issues are thought to determine election winners and losers. Moreover, parties are thought to interpret election results according to the national political situation.
The second view, in contrast to the first predominant one, contends that European parties have responded to the impact of integration, ultimately influencing the direction of the European integration process (Ladrech, 2002). EU policies are increasingly affecting domestic policy-making agenda setting, and a European identity is slowly developing among some European citizens. As such, it would not seem unreasonable to hypothesize that political parties are also becoming increasingly Europeanised: parties may have slowly changed and utilised the EP elections to state their stance on Europe, to put forth their goals for Europe-wide policies, and therefore to omit or at least draw less reference to the debate of national issues. A different economic environment, a more intense competition for votes and party cohesion may be the explanatory factors for such changes (Harmel and Janda, 1994; Müller, 1997; Kitschelt, 1999), but it could also be argued that a European party system, together with a European electorate, are slowly emerging with parties that are adapting (Andeweg, 1995; Mair, 1999). Hence, the dynamics between integration and national parties have to be re-evaluated. As a consequence of integration, parties change and adapt to a newly developing political landscape (Ladrech, 2002), even to the point where Europeanisation has resulted in the ideological ‘mellowing out’ and increasing ‘professionalisation’ of some parties’ politics as seen in European Green parties (Bomberg, 2002). However, a main insufficiency in the literature remains because there is not one study that satisfactorily deals with political parties as actors in this process.
Objectives of the Study
Seeking to better understand how parties are affected by the European integration process, and how they adapt to this new political situation, this study is situated in the context of a Europeanisation process of national political systems as a whole and aims to measure the changes derived from European integration with respect to parties. The paper’s specific objectives are three-fold.
First, through analysis of developments in Italy, we examine whether or not political parties deem the European topic as more important for their party politics. Noteworthy here is the salience of ‘Europe’ and whether or not European issues are incorporated more dominantly into party discourses over time. If Europeanisation occurred, one would see a change in the dimensionality of the national political space precisely because the added European dimension gains importance. Hence, we assume that this new dimension has an impact on the parties’ perceptions of Europe, which leads to the observation of a Europeanisation process in terms of higher European salience.
Based on findings relating to this first objective, the second objective is to contribute to the ‘second-order-election’ debate. As aforementioned, EP-elections are considered of secondary importance as they do not focus on European issues, policies, institutions and political parties but, rather, are contests on national governments’ performance. However, one may hypothesize that EP-elections have gained in importance since 1979, being reflected also in parties’ manifestos. Thus, the more the salience ‘Europe’, the more reflective this would be of the idea that EP-elections have moved from second- to first-order elections.[1]
A third related objective is to examine party positions towards European integration per se, analysing whether or not changes in policy positions have occurred based on the Europeanisation process. This objective is therefore not a descriptive outline regarding parties’ stances regarding European integration, but, rather, an analysis of the degree of influence that participation in EU processes has on their policy positions expressed at the national and European levels. Actors locate themselves differently in the political space because the multi-dimensionality of both national and European space has to be taken into consideration. The dimensionality of a political space includes several dimensions, which constrain the policy position of political actors (Gabel and Hix, 2002). Thus, as the European dimension becomes more dominant in the national space through discourses and actions, it is assumed that parties are now paying increasing attention to their policy position towards Europe. This could result in a revision of their previously superficially articulated stances on European policy, arguably the result of low voting benefits. The direction of policy positions may have changed or may have absorbed a European dimension because of the increasing relevance of the European integration process. Variations within parties and amongst parties regarding their policy positions towards Europe will thus be analysed carefully. One may argue that the European ‘dimension’, in particular, not only shapes party positions, but also represents ‘constraints’ on the policy position of political actors, potentially forcing parties to change platforms. The idea here is that party positions can be broadened due to the introduction of a new European dimension where parties not only have to locate themselves, but also differentiate themselves from others.
Italian Parties and Europe
The literature accepts that Italy, as one of the founding members of the Community, has traditionally been a strong supporter of closer union. Furthermore, opinion poll data indicates that there is widespread support among Italian citizens for the EC/EU. However, closer scrutiny reveals the impreciseness of this view. Rather, there is considerable evidence suggesting that parties have held quite dynamic views towards a united Europe. This section briefly examines the major parties stances on EU integration. This overview also seeks to serve as a basis to evaluate the results obtained in our later analysis and better determine whether experts’ estimates on party positions are valid.
Examining active Italian political parties that can trace their roots to those belonging to the First Republic, one sees that current positions towards the EU may actually not reflect stances taken in the past. There is the perception that left leaning parties today are more pro-European than their conservative counterparts. However, the very positive attitude of the left towards the EU is by no means all encompassing nor has a solid history. The heirs of the old PCI are a primary example of this.
Far from being enthusiastic about the European project, the Communist party held negative views when the integration process started. This rather sceptical attitude was due to both the international context and ideology. European integration was seen by the PCI as another move towards locking Italy into the West to the detriment of an autonomous and possibly changeable position. Like membership to NATO, EU membership meant further obstacles regarding a rapprochement to the Soviet Union. This attitude changed in the late 1960s and by the 1970s the party started to move in the opposite direction, although it opposed acts aimed at solidifying the Union such as the European Monetary System and the Single European Act. Despite this negative posture, EU membership per se, just like acceptance of Italy’s membership to NATO, no longer posed a problem to the PCI even if in disagreement with the Community’s economic policies. Rather, the PCI saw in Europe an opportunity to strengthen its domestic and international profile. The heirs of the PCI are perceived to hold opposing views to the EU, with the DS being strong supporters and Rifondazione Comunista (RC) being antagonistic to it. It should be underlined, however, that RC basis its opposition on the neo-liberal economic model of development and not on a nationalistic platform (Salvadori, 1999).
Unlike the PCI, the Christian Democrats have always supported the EC/EU. Further, international constraints were a major factor in DC’s supporting the integration process. EU Membership was seen as a step towards locking Italy into a multilateral and Western based institution, providing a complementary economic ‘lock’ to the ‘military’ one offered by NATO. This tradition of Community support continued until the final days of DC and the heirs of that tradition are probably the most pro-European actors within the two coalitions. It is probably no surprise that a ‘member’ of the Italian Christian Democratic family is today the Head of the EU Commission.
Consistency in attitudes, albeit with moderate changes, is also a trait of the right wing party Italian Social Movement – National Alliance (MSI – AN). While the MSI recognised at the early stages of integration that membership was a solid insurance policy for the country against the risk of sliding ‘eastward’, it has never been an enthusiastic supporter. Reasons for this are found in the party’s belief in national autonomy and independent decision-making. Like many other conservative parties across Europe, the MSI-AN saw increasing EU legislative and regulatory powers as a dangerous threat to national independence. While recognising the importance of co-operation in a new globalised world, the heir of the MSI has not dramatically changed its position and remains moderate in its enthusiasm for increased integration.
Considering that the Northern League (LN) is a right-wing regionalist party, it is striking how it differs from the consistency of MSI-AN. A significant trait of the LN since its inception was its positive attitude towards the Community (Cavatorta, 2001). The reason for such an enthusiastic support was based on the LN leadership’s view of the necessity to strengthen a supranational entity in order to weaken the central government and increase regional power vis-à-vis increased Brussels led delegation of power to the regions. LN also supported a drastic change in economic policies and emphasised the need for neo-liberal reforms to favour small and medium enterprises in the North. Given this strong support for Europe, the U-Turn from Europe in 1998 was a surprise (Iltanen, Kritzinger and Chari, 2004). The leadership outlined the reasons for the dramatic shift in attitude, stressing the overbearing bureaucracy, senseless regulations, and the loss of cultural identity to a disliked ‘European’ one tainted with multicultural tones.
Finally, the attitudes of Forza Italia (FI) are of significance. As the once Euro-positive LN, FI was strongly pro-European, specifically focussing on Euro entry. However, this enthusiasm recently diminished because the party has become more traditional, rather than a movement with a charismatic leader (Pasquino, 2001). There is in fact a faction within FI that does not share the strong positive attitude initially outlined by Berlusconi. This faction, led by Finance Minister Tremonti, is sceptical of the integration process and advocates more autonomy in foreign, economic and social policy-making. The rift within the party over Europe, accompanied by the LN criticism of the EU, was manifest in the resignation in 2001 of the strongly pro-European Foreign Minister Ruggiero.